GPL Violation?

[Tony Whitmore]

On Tue, 8 Apr 2008 08:25:07 -0400, jieryn at gmail.com wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I've been in a small discussion with a software vendor that originally
> started out as a GPL'd project on SourceForge. In the years of
> development, the author decided that he no longer wanted his source
> code to be GPL'd (apparently due to not making enough to live on..)
> and started his own company. That company now sells an admitted
> derivative work of the original project, but the code is no longer
> GPL'd.
> 
> Is this legal?

It depends on who holds the copyright for the source code. If the same
developer holds all the copyright, then he can relicense has he sees fit.
There are plenty of FLOSS projects which use multiple licenses, for example
MySQL. 

What the developer can't do is use code which contains patches submitted to
the project under the GPL under a different license, without first gaining
the contributor's permission. He also can't remove your right to use the
last version of the GPL source code as a basis for your own project. 

Thanks,

Tony